Much of the media content presently available to consumers, such as entertainment content in the form of music, videos, and games, for example, can be provided as highly immersive, multimodal sensory experiences, using state of the art visual, sound and tracking systems. However, and despite the recognized potential for haptic feedback to further enhance the experience of consumers of these types of media content, haptic effects have heretofore been provided as an adjunct to media content in a relatively limited and inflexible manner. Furthermore, despite the proliferation of personal computing and communication devices enabling consumers to continuously interact with various types of media content while working, studying, exercising, or performing errands, for example, there is no infrastructure presently available to allow those consumers to create, modify, and share haptic effects associated the media content they enjoy.
Haptic technology, or haptics, is a tactile feedback technology, which recreates a sense, such as a sense of touch by generating or applying haptic effects, e.g. forces, vibrations or motions to a user. It has been described as doing for the sense of touch what computer graphics does for vision. Haptic devices may also incorporate tactile sensors that measure forces exerted by the user on the interface.
When compared with so much of the available technology enabling consumers to interact with and use highly sophisticated electronic devices, conventional approaches for producing haptic effects have developed relatively slowly, and typically require the use of expert codes and the participation of experienced and proficient hapticians. These constraints imposed on the authoring of haptic effects have tended to hinder their wider application to the range of media content enjoyed by consumers. Moreover, the present lack of an authoring infrastructure designed to enable average consumers and other novice users to create, modify, and share haptic effects undesirably prevents those consumers and novice users from engaging with available media content in a more creative and participatory way.